CC: To give you
some background about myself, I’ve been playing chess since 8th
grade.

Zwick: Okay.

CC: I grew up
with Bobby Fischer.

Zwick: Oh my
goodness.

CC: I wanted to
be Bobby Fischer. And so…

Zwick: When you
say grew up with him—did you grow up knowing
him? Or just… as a contemporary?

CC: As a
contemporary.

Zwick: Ah! Okay.
That makes 2 of us.

(Laughter)

CC: So I was
wondering, you know, I watched every game of the match, channel 13 in New York,
broadcast and channel 2 here in Boston picked up every game of the match. It
was the highlight of my 8th grade. And I was wondering, what brought
you to Bobby Fischer and chess? After all these years? I’ve looked at your IMDB…

Zwick: Well, I
mean, yeah I was a little bit older than you—I was in college, in the dorm. I
had played as a kid. I wouldn’t say passionately, but I played a bunch. And,
you know I guess, I was very attuned in addition to chess to the political
landscape—

CC: Okay.

Zwick: It was the
time of SALT II, and because I’m a little bit younger than you, I was actually maybe
in 8th grade or even a little bit younger than that when we were
doing duck and cover and you know my friends and I built bomb shelters and so,
my awareness of the Cold War, and my interest in it was pretty strong. So—to
then see these two men, this young kid, and go out there as a representative of
their respective ideologies—certainly captured my imagination then. But, like many things, and by the
way other movies I’ve made, I’d also read the story of Robert Gould Shaw when I
was at Harvard, and didn’t make the movie about it for twenty years later, so
these things, they reside in your imagination some place and then something
sparks them. In this case, Steve Knight, was a guy, a screenwriter I’d worked
with before, and Tobey Maguire, who was someone I knew because I’d made a movie
with his best friend, Leonardo DiCaprio, were involved in this project that I’d
heard about—through Steve, and through Tobey, and for all I knew, that they
were already to talking to David Fincher, to do it. Only, David Fincher decided
to do something else, and I got a call, from everyone saying would I be
interested in joining them? And the answer was an unequivocal yes.

CC: Huh. No, I
understand that movie was in—I don’t know if production hell is quite the word
for it—but a long time coming.

Zwick: The
financing was. I mean, it was financing hell. I mean, yes, there were two other
writers, and then Steve wrote it, and then getting the financing and all of us
working together on script was a long process, and it finally, you know, found
its way.

CC: I understand
Tobey Maguire’s production company had 10 years involved in this? I want to
make—

Zwick: Yeah, I
think that’s true.

CC: And what do
you think Tobey’s motivation for this—for spending so much time on this?

Zwick: Uh, it’s
hard to find a movie that really interests you ever as an actor or filmmaker.
When you find one that has your imagination, you stick with it, I mean—

CC: Right.

Zwick:In my experience, Shakespeare in Love took, nine years, and—

CC: Really?

Zwick: Traffic
took six, yeah. And Legend of the Fall took 7, and this is something that we’re
all, unhappily resigned to as part of what our lives are like, and you often
work on several things at once, waiting for one of them to sort of become real.

CC: Did you ever,
I was trying to think earlier about who’s surviving from that, and I could only
come up with two names. And one’s Boris Spassky, and he’s living in Moscow, and
I believe, early stage Alzheimer’s.

Zwick: He was not
someone we could talk to, and actually, Father Lombardy is alive—

CC: Yes, he just
put out a game collection. A book recently, which I have. Bill Lombardy is no
longer a priest, he put out a game collection, a book.

Zwick: Yes, I
heard that, and by the way, we spent a lot of time talking to Paul Marshall’s
widow. She was lovely. Paul Marshall died about 3 years ago, but his widow was
enormously helpful and forthcoming. I met other people that knew Bobby, and
Saidy, and others. And Tobey went out of his way to meet people who’d known
him. And there’s a lot been written, and Liz Garbus made a wonderful
documentary.

CC: Right.

Zwick: And there
are the speculative psycho biographies, and there are the things that Bobby
himself wrote and his interviews, and its not like there was any lack of
material to try to draw upon, but at the end of the day, a film is finally a
leap of imagination. It’s not a documentary.

CC: Right. So
there’s no particular one source document for the movie.

Zwick: Not one.
There were so many.

CC: Right. It’s a
very good looking movie. I saw the screening here in Boston last week; it’s a
handsome movie.

Zwick: Well,
that’s nice. We didn’t have a lot of movie, but Brad Young is really one of the
rockstars of his day as a cinematographer, and we had a great group of people
in Montreal. It’s a very vibrant film community there, and they’re used to
making do with very little. And so, we did our best.

CC: Well, you
certainly got your money’s worth, because it’s a very good looking movie. I was
very impressed. And you actually did some filming in Reykjavik? In Iceland?

Zwick: Oh, we
went to Reykjavik for about two days—it’s all we could afford—for about 2 and a
half days. Actually, we arrived and started shooting at night, and went through
the day. And then shot the next day and night. And then we flew—we had 2 days
in Los Angeles at the end I did the pickup crew to get those shots at the beach
and at the Hilton.

CC: I was
surprised. I was thinking much higher budget, based upon…

Zwick: Well, the
reality, you talk about net and gross, because you try to get tax rebates. We
had about 19 million dollars to make the movie, really.

CC: That’s all?

Zwick: That’s
all.

CC: That’s
amazing. You all did an amazing job on that then, because it looks much more
expensive than that. You have, I think A-list stars on it.

Zwick: Everybody on the movie liked it. Well,
every movie an actor loves, so using that phrase is a bit clichéd, but people
did this because they liked the material and they wanted to do it, and nobody
was doing it for the money.

CC: Well, that’s
good. I’m very amazed by that. I had another question. Most of you movies are
sort of what I call earthy. But this movie is very intellectual, in a sense.
How do you, as a filmmaker, how do you handle that? In A Beautiful Mind, they
had some color things with numbers flashing across the screen, and I’ve found
it always hard when people try to represent chess in movies. That seemed to me
a challenge for you.

Zwick: It was. I
knew that it would never be possible to teach the audience chess. I could only
hope that those who knew it would understand that we had some sense of what we were
doing, with other errors hopefully forgivable, or compressions, or omissions,
or oversimplifications because when you’re in a world of film, everything is
necessarily reductive, and so things stand in for other things, almost like
poetry—this means this, this, and this. That being said, I believe that there
was the ability to do something that would be accessible on an emotional level,
or maybe better said, on a subjective level. And I think what you’re maybe
suggesting is this is the first movie that I’ve done that is more of a
character study, and that dominates over the historical context, or even the
plot context. It is deeply introspective in that way. Trying to capture his
subjective experience. And I think that was based on things Bobby had written himself,
when he said that Chess is the domination of one personality by another, or a
book that I read, which you might know, many years ago, that John McPhee wrote,
called Levels of the Game, and he was writing about a Tennis Match between
Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, in 1968 or so, in which finally, his thesis
about who won was about mental toughness. And I tried to say there was a way to
juxtapose this internal experience with a larger political context in which it
took place, and to even suggest that there was some kind of spill some kind of
resonance between the two. Because Bobby Fischer, if you think about it, was
really the very beginning International media culture—how someone who was
unknown could suddenly become a household name within weeks. And Bobby Fischer
was the least prepared person for that—

CC: of anybody.
Chess players are like that too, although now it’s different, with Magnus
Carlsen being a fashion model.

Zwick: Although,
I met Magnus actually just the other day.

CC: Really?

Zwick: We saw a
demonstration in which he played four players, he played blindfolded. Four
players at random played against him, and he had a clock, and he took them all
each within 10 minutes of his time. It was really a remarkable moment.

CC: There’s a
fellow in Las Vegas who’s a Grandmaster, and he’s trying to set the record for
blindfold simultaneous of 58 boards.

Zwick: Oh.

CC: It’s that
much. He came here and played 10 boards at once, at the Waltham Chess Club in
Waltham, MA. He’s working hard on that. He’s going to play 50 boards in October
at a Mensa meeting in Chicago.

Zwick: In any
case, he is a sociable person, but you can also see that there seem to be
certain social anxieties that anyone who becomes that sort of reluctant media
star has. I sensed a little bit of that.

CC: In Magnus?
Probably?

Zwick: Just a
bit, yeah.

CC: Bobby
certainly had that. Bobby was just—he’d be very happy on a run by himself with
someone else playing.

Zwick: Yeah, and
that’s the point, that someone like Magnus, or today, people who are
magnificent Olympic swimmers, or people who are even ballerinas, they do have
some opportunity to develop other aspects of their personality or to be
socialized, and you have the feeling that really, he was so involved, from such
a young age, and that chess became such a refuge to him, and devoted himself,
hour after hour, day after day, year after year, to this extraordinarily
draining mental exercise.

CC: It’s a very
hard game. And one thing about Bobby, and most chess players of his era, was
that they had this artist mentality, because there was no money in chess. No
social standing.

Zwick: Although
Kasparov and Magnus both said that, in fact, even in the midst of all of his
demands, you know, he would make 20 demands, and five of them became so
important to legitimize and professionalize chess that, in fact, it was a
remarkable way in which the game did gain stature and respect by virtue of what
he did.

CC: That’s true.
His demands, seemed unreasonable at the time, but actually were very
reasonable, in effect. When he forfeited the championship, he had 3 or 4
demands, which they wouldn’t meet, and all 3 or 4 of them are quite reasonable.
Not the demands of a crazy person. Very reasonable. But the Russians have
always controlled, more or less, the International chess organization. So they
weren’t going to agree to anything. Not for him. At that time. A couple of
other questions. My understanding is that you’re Jewish?

Zwick: I am
Jewish, yes.

CC: I was
wondering how you handled Bobby’s, personally and cinematically, his virulent
anti-Semitism.

Zwick: What can I
say? I know a little bit about what it was to be those Jewish communists in New
York in that period, and to be a red diaper baby. I was not, although I’ve
known many people who were. I’m very interested in what the currency is of that
kind of madness as it declines. I have anecdotal experience with people who’ve
had breaks. And it was very interesting to me in both of those cases, other
cases, in which they chose something regressive as the currency of what they
would focus on, obsess about, be delusional about. Something from childhood.
Something unexpected. In this case, the idea that he would seize on
surveillance, but also his Jewishness, was not surprising to me.

CC: Really?

Zwick: Yeah. We
also know that anti-Semitic self-loathing is something that people think about
who are not having mental health issues. And the idea that there could be some.
Now again, I’m venturing out way past my area here. I’m not a mental health
professional, I’m a writer, and I’m not a physician, I’m a poet. This all just
the kind of speculation that one makes. But as far as the Jewishness went too,
there was great ambivalence toward one’s Jewishness even among the American
Communist Party.

CC: Right. We’re
just all puzzled by it. Most chess players will discuss that, and they’re really
quite puzzled by how Bobby could be so anti-Semitic and yet be Jewish himself.

Zwick: Yeah. And
we didn’t even get to, because it just didn’t seem to be what the point of the
movie was, where he got to by the end. I also did try to talk a little bit in
the movie about the world wide church of god and that fascination that he had
with that really nutty voice too.

CC: When he spent
the night in the Pasadena jail, he put out a pamphlet.

Zwick: Exactly, I
know.

CC: He was
arrested and stripped down, and beaten, and all these terrible things, which
have to be fantasy. I would think they would be fantasy.

Zwick: I know.

CC: Going into
this, what did you think of Boris Spassky?

Zwick: My
impression was that Boris Spassky was quite a like a wonderful sportsman. That
he had a great sense of the game and the sort of the honor of the game. I know
that he was not an ideologue. I know that as soon as the Soviet Union broke up
that he moved to Paris. I know that he probably stayed and didn’t defect
because his wife and children were there during this time. And the fact that he
then developed this peculiar friendship with Fischer for the next years that
followed I think spoke enormously well of him.

CC: Right. No, he
was actually friends before that. He actually recommended—

Zwick: He and
Fischer were friends.

CC: Yes. They
went on a grand tour of South American Chess Tournaments somewhere in the 50s. And
I remember, the one thing I remember is that Bobby used to come to the board
with blue jeans and t-shirts on, looking like a teenager. And Boris recommended
that, why don’t you look better? Why don’t you dress better? And he started
wearing suits.

Zwick: I love
that, because he ended up being quite a dresser. That was one of his great trademarks.

CC: That’s right,
and that basically comes from a comment that Spassky made to him—a friendly
comment made to him.

Zwick: Huh. Well,
boy, you certainly have immersed yourself in all of the Fischeriana.

CC: As I said, I
grew up with, you know, for or better or for worse, right? I mean, after 75’
though, he disappeared completely. He sort of broke our hearts. I think it’s a
great American chess tragedy.

Zwick: Maybe
really just an American tragedy and not just a chess tragedy.

CC: That’s true.
One last question, if I could. You mentioned that Paul Marshall, actually a
fine performance, one of the strongest performances in the movie, I think, by
Michael Stuhlbarg.

Zwick: Yeah,
Michael Stuhlbarg.

CC: You mention
the fact, you imply that he might be CIA, or a government agent.

Zwick: Well, what
I imply, at least, what I look at, at that period of time, if you think about
1970, 1971, and what you know about the connections between the White House and
business, and whether it was Bebe Rabozo, or whether it was money in a slush
fund that ended up dirty tricks, or Watergate, or any of these things, there
was money, and the actual tracing—there wasn’t nearly the same kind of scrutiny
and/or ways in which money was traced. And the fact that they may have funneled
money to Bobby, so as to help him represent, even before that English guy raised the purse, you know,
heightened the purse, I was led to believe, and I think it was Dotty Marshall
who even suggested to us that, yeah, there was help given. I mean, look at all
of the things that were talked about in terms of some of our athletes even
around that time or later, you know, it would not surprise me at all, that
there would be some kind of assistance.

CC: Okay, so that
was the point you were trying to get across.

Zwick: Yeah, it’s
like we said, Bobby wants limos, he gets limos. I’m not suggesting that there
was a great scandal about it, but I—the anticommunism of a certain group of
people, including in the Nixon administration was pretty strong.

CC: Right.

Zwick: Here was
an opportunity to give the Soviets a bloody nose. I think Nixon did have a TV
put in the White House, and Kissinger did call them. These are the facts.

CC: Actually,
where did you get the fact about Nixon having a TV in the oval office?

Zwick: Uhh,
forgive me, I don’t remember.

CC: Because I
mentioned to a couple of people, and they couldn’t remember it.

Zwick: The funny
thing is, I actually know Kissinger’s son, David, and so that’s a famous call.